American Foreign Policy in Vietnam - Assignment Example

American Foreign Policy in Vietnam: 1952 to 1973 No president of the United s actually decided to involve the United s in a war in Vietnam (Brinkley 843). Instead, what occurred was a continuum of a policy of involvement, handed over and gradually escalating in intensity from one administration to the next (Brinkley 843). What began in 1954 with basic economic and military aid to the struggling, anti-communist regime in South Vietnam, ended with over 50,000 American soldiers dead, 300,000 injured (Brinkley 882), more U.S. bombs dropped than in World War II (Kennedy 589), and an American populace struggling to understand what happened and why. To begin, the United States' foreign policy in Vietnam under President Eisenhower was conflicted. When Eisenhower ran for president in 1952, the United States was in the throes of the Cold War and McCarthyism (Palmer 886). His platform endorsed a "policy of boldness," asserting that the mere "containment" of communism was not enough, and that the United States should actively seek to recover the lands and free the peoples on which communist forces made a claim (Kennedy 568). However, in Vietnam, when a French garrison was caught in Dien Bien Phu, Eisenhower held back military support, despite that the United States and it citizens were already funding almost 80 per cent of France's colonial war in Indochina (Kennedy 568). After the 1954 international conference in Geneva divided Vietnam in half, though, American involvement deepened (Palmer 920). Eisenhower regarded South Vietnam's pro-western government, headed by Ngo Dinh Diem, as a favorable alternative to Ho Chi Minh's powerful communist regime in the north (Brinkley 845). As such, Eisenhower poured both economic and military aid into South Vietnam, hoping to elicit social reform from Diem (Kennedy 569). By the end of Eisenhower's second term, in addition to receiving several hundred military advisers from the United States and despite the sluggish pace at which Diem promoted social change, South Vietnam became the recipient of a prodigious amount of American economic and military aid, second only in the world to Korea (Brinkley 845). Such was the degree of American involvement in Vietnam that John F. Kennedy inherited upon his succession to the presidency. As opposed to Eisenhower's impotent strategy of "boldness," Kennedy implemented a foreign policy of "flexible response," which developed an assortment of military tactics that could be deployed depending on the situation at hand (Kennedy 581). While seemingly a friendlier policy than that of Eisenhower, the approach carried with it a lower threshold at which military force was the appropriate international response (Kennedy 581). It is not surprising, then, that Kennedy's three short years in office saw a sharp increase in the number of military advisers in Vietnam, the reporting of the first battle deaths, and the U.S.-assisted coup of Diem's disappointing regime (Brinkley 845, Kennedy 582, Palmer 921). By the time of Kennedy's assassination, a graceful pullout from Vietnam seemed unlikely (Kennedy 582). And it was this commitment of the United States government to the battle against the communist movement in Vietnam that President Johnson, upon Kennedy's death, embraced with almost obsessive ardor (Brinkley 846, Palmer 923). Johnson, regarding any withdrawal or weakening of the American military effort as an encouragement to future communist aggression, implemented a policy of "gradual escalation" in Vietnam, anticipating victory by progressively increasing and expanding the intensity of the opposition to North Vietnamese forces (Kennedy 589). As such, during President Johnson's tenure in office, intervention reached its peak: between 1965 and 1968, heavy air raids on supply bases in North Vietnam became almost a daily occurrence, napalm was dropped to flush out the elusive Viet Cong, and the number of ground troops reached its wartime high of 550,000 (Palmer 922). Although Johnson assured American citizens that his policy of gradual escalation and persistent bombardment of the North Vietnamese would produce a speedy result to the conflict, the Tet Offensive in January of 1968 proved him incontrovertibly wrong (Kennedy 589). In March of 1968, with victory remote, Johnson ordered that the bombings be scaled down, that the number of U.S. troops in Vietnam be frozen, and that he would not seek reelection (Kennedy 589, Palmer 923). Thus, in 1968, Richard M. Nixon came to the presidency, armed with an intelligent proficiency in foreign affairs (Kennedy 597). Nixon adhered to a policy advocating the belief that countries, Vietnam included, should and would have to fight their own conflicts without the help of masses of American ground troops (Kennedy 598). So arose "Vietnamization," which called for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam over an extended period of time and the transfer of the armed conflict, along with U.S. arms, training and advice, to the South Vietnamese (Kennedy 597-98). Accordingly, from 1969 to 1972, Nixon decreased the number of U.S. ground troops in Vietnam from 540,000 to 60,000 (Brinkley 879). However, after peace negotiations in Paris stalemated and the North Vietnamese continued their advances, Nixon resumed intense and continuous bombings of North Vietnam, had its ports mined, and expanded the war to include supposed Viet Cong supply bases in Cambodia (Brinkley 879-80, Kennedy 600, 602, Palmer 923). The colossal offensive from the United States led to a ceasefire agreement in 1973, and, in April of 1975, when the North Vietnamese reached Saigon, the last Americans were evacuated from Vietnam (Kennedy 601-02). American foreign policy is driven by many factors, two of which are the political climate of the American people and the inherent political philosophies of the administration in power. The change in American policy towards Vietnam, from Eisenhower's "policy of boldness" to Nixon's isolationist sentiments in "Vietnamization," demonstrates how swiftly the American political climate can change and the effect that such change can have on a country relying on U.S. aid. The questions to be answered, then, before any intervention is begun, are whether the U.S. can sustain what it begins, even in the face of horrific human losses, whether a majority of the American people will abide by the decision in years to come, and whether the potential losses to Americans by waging a foreign war are more acceptable than victory by the proclaimed foe. Without honest, affirmative answers to these questions, the historical horror that resulted from America's intervention in Vietnam may very well recur. Works Cited Brinkley, Douglas. American Heritage History of the United States. New York: Viking, 1998. Kennedy, David M. The Brief American Pageant: a history of the republic. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2000. Palmer, R.R., and Joel Colton. A History of the Modern World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978. Read More